


Eye, Robot

by ilup



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Fluff and Humor, Followers of the Apocalypse (Fallout), Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-20 16:07:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18996007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilup/pseuds/ilup
Summary: Arcade is a doctor. ED-E is a patient.





	Eye, Robot

When the courier dropped off the eyebot, Arcade’s first instinct was to find the nearest body of water.

If he could just remove it to a distant location and _gently_ apply an EMP grenade to it, he figured no one would miss it. Except the courier of course, who called it “Eddie” and baby-talked to it. If it had cheeks, they would be pinched.

The courier’s puppy dog eyes made Arcade reconsider. It’d be just like seeing a patient, the courier had proposed. Arcade was no good at that kind of stuff, but the least he could do was give it a look. Though an eyebot wasn’t the same as a person _,_ maybe it’d be good for research.

Arcade hauled the eyebot onto a workbench. Proximity with the Enclave tech made his skin feel spidery. ED-E, as the banged-up license plate spelled, had been a very, _very_ , naughty bot, in the courier’s words. It had charged into battle head-on with a mother deathclaw and took a clobbering. It’d dropped out of the air like a fly.

Its body was punched in like a deflated ball and three antennae were missing. The surviving antennae looked as though they might snap like twigs. He traced a finger across its chassis, and it came away blackened. A line of copper remained. Fixing this mess would need some serious effort. The courier would owe him one.

He brought out his toolkit, which he mostly used to repair his plasma blaster and fix up the fort, but he’d done enough tinkering as a boy to know what needed to be done. He undid a few loose screws, revealing bullet punctures, 5.56 if he had to guess.

“Made some enemies, have you?” Arcade said. ED-E was a good patient. Didn’t talk so much.

He dug a flathead screwdriver into the seam around ED-E's metal grating. It fell away easier than expected—usually Enclave tech was sealed up tighter than Mr. House.

Behind the grating was a metal mesh. A simple run-around with the screwdriver had it off in seconds, revealing an array of vertical metal panels. Arcade wondered if there would be any end to this metallic onion peeling. Each panel was secured with screws, the indentation on each shaped like a five-point star—a typical feature of Enclave manufacturing.

Arcade dug in his tool box for the matching screwdriver. It felt light in his hand, last used some twenty years since. There were probably dozens of radios, stripped apart and reassembled with _A.I.G_. scrawled on the inside like a maker's mark. Probably all burnt to a crisp on a heap of old Enclave tech, somewhere in New California.

Which made ED-E's preservation all the more incredible. To his knowledge, eyebots were more of an East Coast thing, manufactured and deployed near the old Capital of D.C. to spew propaganda all day and all night. Or at least they used to. ED-E must have made a long trip. Arcade gave a low whistle. It was some comfort to him that hardly anyone would recognize ED-E as an Enclave relic.

He pried the last panel free, chucked it aside, and shined in a light. Some wires looked melted together from a nasty short. The sensor modules probably weren’t black to begin with. Electrical components sparkled inside a cavernous body like crystals.

“Ah. There’s the good stuff.” He reached a hand inside, hoping to find a component to yank out like a loose tooth.

“Ow!” Arcade jerked his hand out, sooty and tender. Trailing up his wrist was the red afterimage of a lightning strike. He clenched his teeth and shook out the pain. “Jesus Christ, do you greet everyone this way?” he asked.

ED-E made no comment. Silent, but deadly.

“I’m really wondering why I agreed to fix this piece of—”

An arc of electricity leapt out of ED-E’s cavernous body and zapped Arcade again.

“AH!”

Arcade’s glasses popped off his face. His hair shot up from his scalp, and he lost footing. His tailbone slammed the wooden floor, and he keeled over, holding himself. His scream caught the attention of Julie Farkas, who had run up the stairs.

“Is everything alright?” said Julie.

In slow movements, Arcade felt around for his glasses, placing them back onto his face and wincing. He eased back up onto his feet, holding his backside, and instinctively covered up his project with his body.

“Yeah. I’m fine,” he said, pushing up his glasses.

“Oh. Okay then.” Julie did not seem convinced. “What’s that?” She pointed at ED-E.

“Nothing—well, just a little favor for the courier. You know how it is. Wacky robots and all that.” Arcade fluttered his fingers then rested his hands behind his back, standing up as straight as he could while abdominal cramps strained to fold him in half.

“Ah, the courier.” Julie winked knowingly. “I’ll leave you be, then. Nice hair, by the way.”

“Thanks, Julie.”

Julie exited down the stairs and left the two alone. Arcade brushed down his hair and smoothed his collar, staining it with soot and grease. He sighed deep and heavy, pockets of pain bursting in his chest, and turned back to ED-E with newfound respect, awe, and fear.

ED-E was no Freeside junkie but was proving to be a much more troublesome patient. The thing about chem addicts was that no matter how much you tried to speak logically, they just couldn’t get it. Chems did that to people, and Arcade had to feel sorry for them. Julie dealt with people like that. Now robots, _all_ they understood was logic. Logic, Arcade could deal with.

But ED-E possessed _emotions_. ED-E, a creation of the Enclave, who were essentially the least emotional people Arcade could call to mind, had thrown a tantrum. He groaned. He could never bring himself to learn bedside manners for people. Now, bedside manners for a robot? He looked around the room and dragged over a nearby stool. Taking a seat, Arcade let some pressure off his feet, which had begun swelling in his shoes. He propped an arm up on his knee and gave ED-E a hard stare.

“First things first—I’m sorry.” Arcade felt idiotic saying it, but the thing had feelings, and they were sensitive.

“I apologize, sincerely, for breaking you open and touching your insides. You’re a really impressive little guy, you know? I mean, all the way from D.C.!” Arcade kneaded his forehead and withheld a sigh.

“I’ve never been to D.C., but I’ve heard things. A lot of people there, well, we’re the same kind of people. And a lot of people didn’t like our kind of people, so there was a lot of fighting, and then lots of people died, and now our people aren’t really _around_ anymore, catch my drift?”

Not a spark could be seen inside ED-E’s body.

“Yeah. I figured not. Well, you’re out here now. The Wild West. Welcome—we’ve got tumbleweeds and turf wars.” Putting on his best radio voice, he continued, “And in case you didn’t catch it earlier, my name is Arcade Israel Gannon, and I’m a member of the Followers of the Apocalypse, based in Freeside in the sunny Mojave desert—oh, damn it, this is useless.”

A crackling sound erupted from ED-E—a warning.

“You want me to keep going, huh?” Arcade bit his lip and hunched over. “Look, I’m just gonna cut to it. I need you to cooperate with me if you want to get better. I think—I know you’re in pain, and I’m the only one who can help you out. I want to fix you, get you up and running. The courier asked me that much, and I do what the courier says.” Arcade paused, then shrugged. “And you know what? I’ll throw in a little extra something, too.”

He brought the stool closer to the workbench and glanced around the room. No one around. He leaned into ED-E as if it had ears.

“There’s got to be a reason why you came all the way west from the Capital. If you _let me_ access your data banks, I can understand _why_. And I can help you finish that mission. I can let the courier know, too. If you’d like. But if I can’t even _touch_ you without getting a megavolt to the testes, there’s nothing I can do for you.”

Arcade threw in at the end, “And that would make the courier, very, _very_ disappointed.”

With no indication from ED-E, Arcade hesitantly left the stool.

He picked up a screwdriver, then set it down, choosing instead to fish inside his tool box for a pair of rubber gloves to serve as a paltry defense. Snapping them on, he laid a finger on ED-E’s chassis. If ED-E were to have another outburst, it’d be best to sacrifice the non-dominant hand, Arcade figured. His hand shook, but he’d have to find out one way or another what ED-E was thinking.

“I’m going in, and I’m trusting you not to fry me into bacon.”

Arcade reached in, gritting his teeth, and poked the first electrical component he could find. Not even a tingle. He gave it a wiggle, and it popped right out. Arcade’s eyes widened, and he withdrew the item.

It was a solid rectangular block, deeply blackened and with two prongs where it once attached into ED-E. Arcade found a dry rag and rubbed at the module like a lottery ticket revealing an aluminum surface underneath and a string of numbers. He held it up to the light, and the numbers didn’t mean anything to him, but the tiny text underneath indicated the block was a memory bank. Arcade raised his eyebrows, and set the module aside.

Another tenuous reach in drew out a voice modulator, then a microphone, toasted wires, hardened circuit boards, a gyroscope, the busted flight module, and most surprisingly, a dose of Jet.

“The courier might be looking for this,” Arcade mused to himself, tossing the Jet to the side.

ED-E was a treasure trove of electronics, and Jet, evidently, as Arcade pulled out another dose. By all the stuff crammed into it, ED-E was something custom-built, a fruit of love. It was kind of cute, if you squinted, in that vicious nightstalker pup sort of way.

The more he stripped out of ED-E, the more his confidence in his ability to reassemble everything diminished. It would be a long night.

—

ED-E’s parts laid in a grid pattern across the room. Every component was shot or on its last legs. On his knees, Arcade labeled each and every one, trading a new vacuum tube for the old, and a new bit of metal for the rusted. Bloodshot eyes surveyed the grid. Like the ship of Theseus, Arcade pondered if the new ED-E would be the same as the old.

If he even got that far. He’d commissioned Michael Angelo down on the Strip to create new armor and antennae and Emily Ortega to create a terminal adapter for the memory bank module. The courier would be returning by the end of the week, expecting a functional eyebot. Arcade thought about how much the courier relied on ED-E in combat and shuddered at the thought of the courier’s making another bone-headed decision to charge into a deathclaw nest without the least bit of backup. There was Boone, although he had the misfortune of being human and thus irreparable in case of death.

Arcade found himself polishing the same metal plate the better part of an hour before deciding his time would be better spent asleep. He dreamt of circuits the size of open fields and lightning storms. It all seemed too real.

—

“How’s your project going?” asked Julie. Holding a syringe between each knuckle, she rummaged around in a drawer for glassware.

“You could say it’s, uh, going.” Arcade busied himself soldering two wires together, cursing as a blob of liquid metal leapt onto his finger and melted through the rubber glove. “Just one more component. Just—one—more—Aha!”

An exterior bulb flickered on the spherical chassis, then flickered out. Arcade’s heart dropped, and he let the hot soldering iron fall to the ground, then pulled the plug. He threw himself over the robot, clutched it, and damned it.

He heard quick footsteps and felt gloved hands pulling him to his feet.

“You don’t seem to be doing so well. How about you take a break?” said Julie.

“Thanks for the offer, Julie, but I’m doing just fine,” said Arcade, stumbling back.

Julie took hold of him and led him to a chair before a terminal, setting her hands firm on his shoulders. “Take a seat here and don’t even think about working for the next hour. I’m going to synthesize some Fixer. Join me when you feel better.” In a few stately footsteps, she left, glassware clinking in hand.

Bleary-eyed and slumped to the side, Arcade idly clicked through terminal entries and ancient email logs, before discovering a new folder: _0100010101000100010001010001010_. EDE’s memory bank files had finally completed extraction. Arcade sat up straight, heartbeat quickening.

He entered the folder. Hundreds of files, each with thousands of lines of numerical gibberish encoded something like location or sensory data, if they could be parsed out. Dozens of audio files filled the rest of the folder. Arcade turned the volume knob down, then listened.

 _“I...the...assets...Hell...understand...ED...”_  A man’s voice cut in and cut out as if portions of his narrative had been snipped away. He had to be Enclave. If the choppiness wasn’t enough, a layer of static obfuscated the message. It was unlikely to be censorship—probably radiation damage. Arcade’s eyelids drooped down. There was nothing much to be gained.

Another file contained something like a theme song or an old holotape showtune.

 _“...fly far...fl—”_ The voice of a young boy cut out with a droning buzz.

Arcade began to click at random. The audio made as much sense as it did in order. A collection of animal mating noises, battle sounds, and radio recordings cluttered in between segments of the Enclave man’s voice.

_“I've... destin...our outpost...Navar—”_

Arcade turned away from the terminal and returned to more mechanical endeavors.

Arcade surveyed ED-E with fresher eyes. It’d come together better than expected. The bot was nearly restored, its chassis repaired and shining, electrical components in place. The bulb glowed on the exterior, and Arcade eased. The only thing left was the memory bank to slot inside. With that, Arcade slung a tarp over ED-E and clutched his lapels. On his way out of the workshop, he grabbed a few beakers.

—

Arcade discarded his gloves, stained with dubious purple fluid and dried his cold, sweaty hands. They’d produced over a hundred doses of Fixer, enough to last another week. While Arcade wanted to rest his mind with some light reading of Plutarch's _Lives_ , the courier would be back in a day’s time.

ED-E laid undisturbed, but the terminal was occupied.

“April? What are you doing?” Arcade walked over to the terminal.

“Analyzing the data off this memory bank.” April Martimer was one of the most technologically inclined Followers, much more so than Arcade. Hunched over the keyboard, she eased back and allowed Arcade a look. He leaned in.

“There’s everything from blueprints for Poseidon Energy solar cell manufacture, energy weapons technology, historical meteorological data, a list for the ‘Top 50 of the 50s’...it’s incredible. Not to mention all the recordings,” she gushed. “I can’t believe it.”

“Impressive,” said Arcade. “How did you decrypt them?”

“I coded up a little interpreter and ran the files through. And all these audio files, I just interpolated them with an old bit of code.” April swiveled around. “These files came off an Enclave eyebot, didn’t they? There’s a number of recordings referring to Navarro, Adams Air Force Base, a researcher named Whitley…”

Navarro. The pieces aligned in Arcade’s sleep-deprived mind—ED-E had been sent on a doomed mission from Adams to Navarro. And the Enclave man’s name—Whitley. The promise he’d made to ED-E withered, and he felt a cold sweat returning. He scratched the blond fuzz sprouting from his face.

“Er, that’s probably true. It’s probably Enclave. Yeah.” Arcade sighed. “It’s over here.”

He lifted the tarp and gave April a glance of ED-E.

“Incredible find,” she said, turning back to the terminal. "Anyways, these data will definitely be useful. I'm just glad the _Brotherhood_ didn't get a hold of it."

"Yes, that would be a bad thing."

"That eyebot must've come a long way. These location data suggest it originated at Adams, near the old Enclave capital and was heading for…Navarro?" April bit her lip and squinted at the screen. "Navarro's under NCR control now. Hardly any place for an Enclave eyebot."

"That—would be my conclusion as well. Uh, April, once you've saved the useful files, do you mind doing me a favor?"

"Of course, what is it?"

"This thing—eyebot—rightfully belongs to the courier. It's my responsibility to restore it to working order. Since it's obviously programmed to travel to Navarro—a barren wasteland no one in their right mind would want to visit—would you mind reprogramming it to go, well, not there?”

"No problem."

"You're a lifesaver."

With a few deft clicks, April ported the files to a holotape, and following a few keystrokes, she popped out the memory bank from its adapter and held it out in her palm.

"All clear."

The last piece of ED-E was ready to go in. A pang of guilt twisted in his gut. It was as if he'd just asked April to give ED-E a lobotomy.

"You didn't erase the whole drive did you?" asked Arcade.

"Of course not, I just deleted the destination coordinates. It should be set to 'wandering mode' now. It’ll just imprint on a human, then follow them around. I read about it in the user manual."

_A user manual?_

"I'll get back to you with anything else I can find from this data. And pass on my thanks to the courier."

"Will do," said Arcade.

April shut down the terminal, and held the holotape close to her chest.

“Take care of yourself, Arcade. You look a little twitchy.”

“Absolutely,” he said. She quirked a brow and left him with an offer of a coffee if he was in the need.

As soon as April made her exit, Arcade slotted in the memory bank and a battery pack. With that, ED-E began to vibrate. It was alive. A twist of the screwdriver and _snap_ of metal later, ED-E had been reborn.

It remained on the workbench for a good few minutes, longer than Arcade could hold his breath. Then, it hovered a few inches off the surface. He let go of a week's burden in an exhale and wondered if he should give the eyebot a physical examination—check its reflexes and pupillary dilation—but more than anything, he was astonished it’d functioned at all. After about fifteen minutes, ED-E reached its usual altitude of eight feet above the ground and puttered around the room.

Then, it looked straight at Arcade. Its antennae furrowed out, then ducked down. ED-E cast its gaze toward the ground and emitted a series of sad beeps. It was likely the exhaustion, but Arcade felt he could understand ED-E’s...speech.

“I accept your apology.”

With a trill, ED-E circled the room, dashed from the floor to ceiling, and swiveled around. It chirped happily, bobbing up and down in the air.

“Hey there, _Eddie_ ,” said Arcade, cautiously. “The courier will pick you up tomorrow, so don’t do anything stupid.” _Like sailing off to Navarro,_ he thought.

Another series of beeps— _devilish—_ came from the bot.  

“Well, that’s not a very nice thing to say about your owner,” said Arcade. “But it is true.”

ED-E beeped sadly.

“What do you mean you don’t want to go back to the courier?” Arcade raised an eyebrow. “Where else are you going to go? Right here?” He shook his head and gestured with his arms. He hadn’t altered the personality cortex, had he? Yet it had grown attached. What had April done?

“I’m really boring. Seriously. I promise you don’t want to hang out with me.”

ED-E’s zapper sparked. Arcade paled.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there, thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed this story.


End file.
